Global Trends 2025

 

Back in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council published Global Trends 2025, A Transformed World, a 100 page report translated in several languages an debated in many governmental proceedings and conferences. The report included sections on climate change and sustainability. I presented those in my CEE 444 course on infrastructure sustainability and resilience. I recently stumbled upon this report and took another look at it because it is now 2025. How much did they get right? What did they get wrong?

I provide answers for four major areas of the report: geopolitics, energy, climate and destabilizing factors.

On the geopolitical front they focused on BRICs… Brazil, Russia, India and China. They expected a bigger role of Brazil. But their contentious politics did not let Brazil shine. They did not expect Russia to become more demographic or technologically important. They got it right, but they did not focus on their cybersecurity advancement and threat. They expected that capitalist forces would enable more political reform in China. Quite the opposite. Xi and advanced technological innovation have made China a 24/7 police state with citizens being constantly monitored while walking, driving, shopping, commenting and in private spaces through their phones. India, despite a decade of stable Modi leadership has remained an underperformer compared to China. They expected it to accelerate to rates closer to China’s. They also expected a major shift of wealth for the West to the East, which seems to have occurred at a slower pace. They correctly predicted economic headwinds for Europe and Japan due to demographic and other reasons. They identified Indonesia, Iran and Turkey to gain substantially in economic power, which occurred, but again at a rate lesser than expected (e.g., by now we are aware of Erdogan’s failed economic experiments and the dramatic sanction on Iran due to its involvement in the Middle East and with nuclear weapons.) Finally, they did not discuss a tariff war anywhere. I assume that they assumed that political leaders were smart enough to avoid it.

On the energy front they expected a major “cleanup” in the energy industry from pollution. They got it mostly right (e.g., the growth in natural gas usage), but they extolled clean coal a lot, an energy source that did not flourish. They were more reserved about renewables because the capacity and cost of batteries were prohibitive. They hoped but did not expect that renewables will become major players until battery storage was sorted out: “new energy technologies probably will not be commercially viable and widespread by 2025.” Presently the storage cost per MWh has made large deployments affordable and large deployments of wind and solar energy have taken place. They were more hopeful about the hydrogen technology such as “plans to generate hydrogen for automotive fuel cells in the homeowner’s garage” which is presently almost non-existent.

On the climate front they were worried about sea level rise, which is not (yet) a big problem in 2025, although several places have exhibited shoreline erosion, and a small number of structures lost to the ocean. Calamitous fires and floods have been the major trend worldwide. Instead, they focused substantially on droughts and water shortages and their consequential effects on food production. We’ve seen less of that for now.

On the destabilizing factors front, they identified two “discontinuities”: nuclear weapons and a pandemic. By nuclear weapons they meant that a rogue agency or terrorist organization got a hold of and used a dirty nuclear weapon. As we know, this has not occurred, but a small risk of this is ever-present. A pandemic did occur in the form of Covid-19 which was unleashed in 2019 and shook the world throughout 2020. Compared to past pandemics, the recovery was quick, but the death toll was in the tens of millions worldwide.